In anticipation of the glamorous Oscar night, we enter the dark side of the movie business to find out which of the nominees in the Best Picture category gets the vote from BitTorrent users. In other words, which of the nominated films was downloaded the most on BitTorrent.

After crunching the numbers, taken from thousands of publicly available torrents, this awards race turned out to be an easy win for Inception. With a staggering 13,780,000 downloads Christopher Nolan’s movie was the clear winner.

The runners up for Best Picture based on the number of downloads are The Social Network and Toy Story 3 with 8,630,000 and 6,620,000 downloads respectively. Although these numbers are interesting, we have to note that the comparison is affected by release dates. Not all of the nominated films were released on BitTorrent at the same time, resulting in a bias towards older releases.

That said, there is a strong indication that Inception would remain the favored Oscar nominee among BitTorrent users if they were allowed to vote for a movie.

BitTorrent indexer BTarena has been running an Oscar poll for the last three years where visitors can vote for their Oscar favorites across various categories. In this poll, which went live just a few days ago, Inception is also in the lead with 33 percent, followed by 127 Hours and Toy Story with 12 percent each.

Aside from picking the Best Picture, BTarena visitors can also pick their favorites in the other categories. Currently, James Franco (127 Hours) is leading the Best Actor category while Natalie Portman (Black Swan) is leading as the Best Actress with half of all votes.

The founder of BTarena told TorrentFreak that he decided to start the Oscar torrents project after the OscarTorrents site went down in 2007. “Oscar winners should be voted on BitTorrent too, right? Not only by a few Hollywood people,” he said.

The big question, however, is what all these downloads and votes are actually worth. Except for the bragging rights, they seem to hold little predictive value.

Last year, half of the voting visitors of BTarena chose Avatar as their favorite, while the Academy members picked The Hurt Locker. In terms of downloads District 9 was the big winner on BitTorrent in 2010, so Nolan and the Inception crew shouldn’t get too excited.

In terms of Box Office revenue Inception has little to complain about though. With $823,576,195 in worldwide revenues the millions of downloads on BitTorrent didn’t get in the way of a healthy profit.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Mininova’s search cloud is a nice illustration. Below is a screenshot of the search cloud on Mininova 12 hours after the Oscar winners were announced, and for comparison, here is another one taken two days ago.

Most prominent in the search cloud is yesterday’s winner “No Country for Old Men”, that received four Oscars, including the one for the best movie.

There is more though. Almost all awarded movies are in the list of most popular searches – There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, La Vie en Rose, Juno, The Counterfeiters, Once, Sweeney Todd, Taxi to the Dark Side, Elizabeth, Ratatouille and Golden Compass. There is only one remarkable absentee from the list, and that is The Bourne Ultimatum.

People are not only trying to find the movies on BitTorrent, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the award ceremony as well, because search terms like Academy Awards and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Last year we reported on the OscarTorrents site, a site where BitTorrent users could choose their own winners. Unfortunately, the site was not available this year as the creators have no time, but they’re promising to be “back next year”. In the meantime (and as usual), the full range of movies will be available at dozens of other torrent sites, right around the world.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

December is traditionally the month when a lot DVD-screeners are sent out to the Oscar voters, and also the time when a lot of these screeners leak. Unfortunately for some, there are pirates among the members of this elite group of movie industry insiders, and measures have to be taken to make it harder to leak the films.

One of the measures is watermarking where the DVD-screeners all get a unique, hidden watermark, so potential leaks can be traced back to the source. Another, perhaps even more effective preventive measure that was used by some studios is the SV-300, a custom-made DVD player that’s been in use since 2004.

The player is developed by Cinea, a division of Dolby Laboratories, and it is used to play encrypted disks that will only play on this particular player. The SV-300 makes it nearly impossible to copy and leak a screener, but surprisingly, the developer decided to phase out the machine because of the negative feedback from the Academy members. It turns out that the Oscar voters don’t like the DRM-machine because it hurts their viewing pleasure:

The machine operating the S-View software that scored few points for being user-friendly in its brief run. Its user base complained of the impracticality of having to lug the machine around on vacation during the holiday season, the height of the screening period.

So what they basically say is: “We don’t like DRM”. I can’t agree more of course, but it is kind of ironic that they tend to get more aggressive in imposing DRM on their customers because they are afraid of piracy, while they abandon this effective anti-piracy player because the DRM doesn’t allow them to watch the screeners on vacation.

Don’t think that the industry insiders are unaware of this, hypocritical as they are, they try to talk it right with some strange arguments. Industry insiders now say that Oscar screeners are not considered a primary contributor to movie piracy. This is strange because only 4 years ago Hollywood lobbied for a total ban of Oscar screeners.

I guess it’s all different when your personal viewing pleasure is at stake.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Almost all oscar winners are in the search cloud. Crash of course as the Best motion picture of the year, Brokeback mountain, King Kong, Syriana, Walk the line, Capote, The constant Gardener, Memoirs of Geisha, Hustle and flow, and The chronicles of Narnia.

Even Tsotsi (foreign language) and March of the Penguins (documentary) are in there

Actually, the only Oscar winners not in the list are the animated and short films. Wallace and Gromit (animated film), The moon and the Sun (animated short film), Six Shooter (live action short film) and A note of Triumph (short movie).

But people are not only looking for the movies, it seems that a lot of people are downloading the show as well because search terms like Academy, Academy awards, Oscar and Oscars are also among the most popular search terms.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.